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Monday, July 11, 2016

Germany mini-trip - day 4

Last
night was the Euro soccer final, although I suppose it would have had a more
galvanizing impact on St. Goar if Germany had made it to the end. As it was,
the Bistro Café Goar was showing the France vs. Portugal game on a TV screen inside.
After we’d finished eating and were having drinks, we moved to the terrace, a
perfect spot for monitoring both this and the river (the parade of grand
industrial barges continuing after dark, like stately elongated whales). When
normal time ended without a goal, some of the clientele left, apparently with
some mocking from the others for their lack of fortitude. We left around that
time too (to no mocking), counting eight or so mostly elderly remainees. And
that was the Sunday action in St. Goar.

On
Monday we again had breakfast in the hotel (the guy at the next table was
surreptitiously assembling sandwiches from the breakfast buffet materials and
putting them in his briefcase) before heading off for another seven hour-plus
exploration. We climbed up behind town to the top of the gorge and followed a
trail for several hours, eventually coming back down at the town of Oberwesel.
As I mentioned, this is only really an achievement in climbing if you’ve artificially
placed yourself down at the bottom – following the trail, we frequently walked
past housing developments or resorts or whatnot, reminding us that’s where the
real world is, up there! The highlight of the walk though came during one of its more
deeply forested sections, where we came across an old man and woman dragging a (very
reluctant) sheep along the path. We should have blocked the way, chanting: Free
the Sheep!

Actually,
the real highlights were naturally the constant views down into the gorge –
every new look-out point gives you a new reason to stop and breathe it in. Oberwesel
also looked great from up above, but is rather dull and disappointing close-up,
even allowing that Monday seems to be a day off for a lot of small businesses.
The biggest comparative limitation may be that St. Goar has hotels and
restaurants with almost direct access to the river (excepting the road, which isn’t
too busy), but in Oberwesel the railway runs closer to the water,
holding back the rest of the town (there’s an old city wall in the way too). I
expect it made sense at the time to lay things down that way, but now it makes the place feel constricted.
We had trouble even finding a suitable place to eat, but eventually sat down
and had a couple of sandwiches, and five separate beverage orders between the
two of us. We watched a woman arriving at a nearby hair salon for what was
presumably a 2 pm appointment, waiting outside for the hairdresser to return from her
break, getting increasingly impatient, trying unsuccessfully to place a phone
call, eventually giving up at around 2.20 pm and leaving under a dark cloud.
The hairdresser turned up ten minutes after that, with her dog and her
shopping bag, beaming happily and without an apparent care in the world. That’s
probably how it goes down here in the small towns.

By
the way, if you climb all the way up from Oberwesel, someone (apparently an
anonymous artist) is carrying out a project of constructing large metal “troll”
sculptures – based on the dates, it appears a new one gets added every year. There’s
one at the roadside; the others are lurking in the woods. Here is Ally with a
representative example.

We
then decided that if we walked on a further 6 km or so to the town of
Bacharach, we’d arrive in time to catch the hourly train back to St. Goar. This
was an easy 6 km by comparison with what we'd already done, all along the river, no climbing. We achieved this with time
to spare, enough to wander round Bacharach (which was also mostly closed) to find
an ice cream. The scenic highlight of the walk was the town of Kaub on the
other side, with its eye-catching white castle on a tiny island in the middle
of the river (it is called Pfalzgrafenstein Castle and was built as a
station to extract tolls from passing vessels – mundane functions were
discharged with so much style in the old days!).

There didn’t seem to be as many cruise ships in the water today –
maybe business surges at the weekend; certainly the volume of motor bikes had
plummeted. I would have placed a bet that Bacharach would have held at least
one prominent tribute to its famous namesake Burt, perhaps a modest statue on
the theme of What’s New Pussycat?, but if so we missed it. It’s another very
picturesque town though, again with old walls and cobbled streets intact, so
that you could shoot a historical film on the back streets with minimal
cover-up of contemporary details.

That
added up to a lot of walking today, a punishing achievement even if the weather
was slightly cooler than yesterday. We picked up another beverage (whenever we’re
in Europe we drink bottle after bottle of Fanta – we never buy it at home, and
if we do it doesn’t taste the same anyway) and then returned to the hotel. Once
again, we did not succeed in seeing Ozu at the pool. Some of the restaurants
were closed tonight, again because it’s Monday I suppose – we ate in a quiet
place in the middle of town, which also closed as soon as we left, and then
ended up drinking beer over the water. It becomes ever more clear that there
are fewer functioning businesses here than meets the eye. For instance, there’s
a hotel near us that looks open – there are flowers in all the windowboxes –
but we’ve never seen any signs of life there, and based on an online search it's not taking reservations. It’s quite sad, the sense that the world is
losing its taste for this kind of quiet location. St. Goar does appear to be a
regular stopping point for a Contiki tour bus – this is a company catering to
18 to 35 year olds, known for the partying nature of the experience – and this
may explain some of the young women we saw wandering around on previous nights.
Mostly though, it appears the Contiki groups stay in a hotel on the other side
of town, where they create their own self-contained world of fun. Can their
world ever overlap with the rest of St. Goar, to spark a new mutually
beneficial way forward...?